The Range of Light
Natalie Smith Parra And then, just like that, here I am again, returned to the Land of the Sick. I’d almost become used to living, however tentatively, in the Land of the Well, not the person I’d been before doctors carved up my body and radiated my heart. But it was a life, and I liked it fine. “Your heart has been baking a long time,” the cardiologist says. I press my lips together, look away from his shiny, dark, shoe-polish hair. I imagine my wet, red heart shuddering weakly on a Pyrex baking dish. Maybe I should flip it over and bake it a bit on the other side, but instead, I push the baking dish back into the oven and return the oven mitt to its hook near the sink. Outside it rains. it’s a 20-year rain event, rivers in the sky dumping buckets. Through the oven vent, I hear water ping on metal. It feels as if the house has broken free of its foundation and is rocking on gentle waves. I drive around the lake to see the waterfalls where none had existed before. White water tumbles down granite, remaking the Sierra into a new shape, throwing rainbow light into the dull sky. A mobile home thrashes in the Merced River. My radiation oncologist started to bake my heart during California’s last 20- year rain event in 1997. For a few years between then and now, I’d lived in a place with real winters, where temperatures dip below zero, and the bones under your skin ache and you can quickly die from exposure, but the L.A. winter of my diagnosis felt, at the time, like the longest, coldest winter ever. It rained without stopping in thick ropes. Garbage cans washed down hills. The sky stayed a dead gray all winter, the color, I imagined, of my lung drained of blood and stored in a jar in the hospital basement. The surgeon realized, too late to avoid lung surgery, that my cancer was inoperable. He sloppily stapled me back together, changed into a clean white coat, combed his hair, and went to the waiting room to tell my family the cancer had spread. I’d be dead in four months. The radiation oncologist offered a tiny chance for a cure, although he didn’t mention the part about baking my heart. But even if I’d known, what choice did I, the mother of a four-year-old and two teenagers, have at the time? It was either imminent death or maybe-less-imminent death. I chose radiation and have lived 22 years with that choice. Back then, my chance at surviving even a year was around one percent. There is more to it: a brilliant surgeon did eventually operate, removing my left lung and scraping hardened tumor off my aorta. Before he agreed to perform the operation, he told me to immediately stop radiation, which, of course, I did. Now, here, in the mountains, water carves its own paths. Atmospheric rivers, on average, are about 250-375 miles wide, almost as wide as the Sierra is long. The asphalt road to town cracks and crumbles into the river’s white water below. One night, a high school girl’s car hydroplanes into the swollen river. She dies and her younger sister lives. Days before, I hydroplaned in that exact spot, but in daylight, I regained control and swerved out of the flooded lane. The girl’s family and friends make a roadside memorial next to the river where her car went off the road: small Christmas trees, stuffed bears, flowers, hand lettered signs, mylar balloons. In California, we pray for rain, and people die from rain. After the winter storms, the sun comes out and white clouds float over the Range of Light. I park next to the wild river flowing from Yosemite to the Central Valley, and eventually to the Pacific Ocean. Just ahead, an Indian family, two men, a woman in a bright pink sari, and two children. They pose for a photo, standing on a low wall, the border between earth and water. Green mountains, white water, light then shadows, the woman laughing, some hair in, some out of her mouth, the pink sari blows around her like a kite teasing the river. I hold her in my sight, as if I could change the river’s course. |
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About the Author:
Natalie Smith Parra's work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Calyx, and Mommy Wars, a Random House anthology, Dove Tales Literary Journal, and is forthcoming in Dryland Literary Journal. She has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, Mesa Refuge, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and others, as well as a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant and a Puffin Artist's Grant. She was born in Los Angeles, and until she became disabled from cancer, taught English and Spanish in high school there.
Natalie Smith Parra's work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Calyx, and Mommy Wars, a Random House anthology, Dove Tales Literary Journal, and is forthcoming in Dryland Literary Journal. She has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, Mesa Refuge, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and others, as well as a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant and a Puffin Artist's Grant. She was born in Los Angeles, and until she became disabled from cancer, taught English and Spanish in high school there.